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Ending the Death Penalty The Truthiness Comes Out Viewers of The Colbert Report—and the rest of the nation—got a big dose of truthiness about the death penalty when the Comedy Central program spotlighted the ACLU of Northern California’s discovery that California corrections officials had engaged in a desperate global scramble to acquire lethal injection drugs. The ACLU’s timely advocacy captured national attention and international headlines and resulted in editorials in top newspapers around the country calling for replacement of the death penalty with life imprisonment without parole. The information came to light in the course of ACLU-NC’s longstanding efforts to end California’s costly experiment with the death penalty. ACLU attorneys grew suspicious after the state had mysteriously managed to acquire lethal injection drugs when they were known to be in short supply. After our public records request was stonewalled, documents handed over by court order revealed a global “secret mission” by state corrections officials, who made inquiries from Sacramento to Pakistan, eventually buying supplies from a wholesaler operating from the back of a driving school in London. Looking Forward After years of county advocacy, only 9 death sentences were handed down in California in 2011. This is the lowest number of new death sentences in 34 years, in fact, the lowest number since the death penalty was instated in 1978. But in November 2012, California voters will finally have a chance to replace the death penalty. Last year a group of law enforcement professionals, crime The spoof on Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" reached millioins of viewers. victim advocates, and individuals exonerated from wrongful conviction launched the SAFE California Campaign, an initiative that will replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole. This initiative could not come at a better time. As ACLU-NC concluded in a hardhitting 2011 report, The Death Penalty is Dead: Anatomy of a Failure, “death penalty costs are extraordinary and detrimental to public safety at a time of economic crisis,” having racked up more than $4 billion in taxpayer dollars since 1978, or a whopping $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out. Californians are finally tuning in to the message that cutting the death penalty will save money and keep our communities safe—without the release of a single prisoner. 8
National Security FBI’s “Islam 101” Fails the Constitutional Test In the decade since 9/11, long-standing safeguards on the FBI’s investigative and intelligence activities have been erased, allowing the agency to engage in racial and ethnic profiling and to initiate intrusive investigations with little or no suspicion of wrongdoing. The ACLU of Northern California has been using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to expose misconduct, abuse of authority, and unconstitutional profiling and other violations of Americans’ rights and liberties. Now, information brought to light through a FOIA lawsuit filed in 2010 filed by ACLU-NC, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian has yielded more than 20,000 pages (and counting) that tell a chilling tale of spying, lying and bias. Among the document trove was an FBI PowerPoint presentation that presented agents with the following “facts” about Muslims: • They engage in a “circumcision ritual” • More than 9,000 of them are in the U.S. military • Their religion “transforms [a] country’s culture into 7th-century Arabian ways.” According to Wired magazine, “the briefing presents much information that has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with constitutionally-protected religious practice and social behavior.” The documents also revealed that Bay Area FBI agents have been using community outreach programs to secretly collect and document intelligence about activities protected by the First Amendment, in violation of the federal Privacy Act. Looking Forward Based on our FOIA documents, as well as 34 coordinated FOIAs filed by ACLU affiliates around the country, the national ACLU is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate Privacy Act violations in the FBI’s San Francisco and Sacramento Divisions and to initiate a broader audit of FBI practices nationwide, urging the FBI to stop using community outreach for intelligence purposes and to purge all improperly collected information. Ashwak Hauter of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center speaks in favor of restoring protections over local intelligence-gathering at a press conference at San Francisco City Hall. photo by Ramsey El-Qare Memo to SFPD: That’s Illegal Are San Francisco police unfairly snooping on local citizens in cooperation with federal authorities investigating terrorism? They’ve denied it for years, but those words rang hollow after we uncovered a secret 2007 memorandum that confirmed a cooperative agreement between SFPD and the FBI. The agreement allows the police to follow a lower federal standard for investigations, without civilian oversight—despite San Francisco’s long-standing policies limiting intelligence gathering. Community members organized a concerted campaign to bring the concerns of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian residents to the fore, and with the ACLU persuaded the supervisors to restore several important protections against racial profiling and the abuse of police power. 9
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Page 13 and 14: Immigrants' Rights “Secure Commun
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Page 25 and 26: ACLU volunteers help out in a range
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